Growing a Garden City: How Farmers, First Graders, Counselors, Troubled Teens, Foodies, a Homeless Shelter Chef, Single Mothers, and More are ... of Local Agriculture and Community

232 Pages·2010·10.65 MB·English

by  Jeremy N. Smith

To Susan O’Connor and Crissie McMullan
Copyright © 2010, 2014 by Jeremy N. Smith Foreword copyright © 2010, 2014 by Bill McKibben
Photographs copyright © 2010, 2014 by Chad Harder and Sepp Jannotta Originally published as Growing a
Garden City All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express
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The Library of Congress cataloged the hardcover edition as follows: Smith, Jeremy N. Growing a garden
city: how farmers, first graders, counselors, troubled teens, foodies, a homeless shelter chef, single mothers,
and more are transforming themselves and their neighborhoods through the intersection of local agriculture
and community—and how you can, too/Jeremy N. Smith; foreword by Bill McKibben; photographs by
Chad Harder and Sepp Jannotta.
p. cm.
“‘How It Works’ sections are based on and incorporate material originally prepared by Garden City
Harvest.”
ISBN 978-1-61608-108-9 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Community gardens—Montana—Missoula.
2. Community-supported agriculture—Montana—Missoula. I. Harder, Chad. II. Jannotta, Sepp. III. Title.
SB457.3.S64 2010
635.09786’85dc22
2010012369
Cover design by Danielle Ceccolini Print ISBN: 978-1-62914-399-6
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63220168-3
Printed in China
Contents
FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION
BREAKING GROUND
The Founder: Josh Slotnick
The Student: Cori Ash
The Teacher: Neva Hassanein
The Caretaker: Rick White
How It Works: Student Farm
GROWING A GARDEN CITY
The Family: Gita Saedi Kiely and Jason Kiely
The Organizer: Tim Hall
How It Works: Community Gardens
The Foodie: Jodi Allison-Bunnell
The Farmer: Greg Price
How It Works: Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)
THE NEW FACES OF LOCAL FOOD
The First Graders: Rattlesnake School First Grade Class
How It Works: Community Education
The Teenager: Hannah Ellison
The Counselor: Tim Ballard
How It Works: Farm Work Therapy
The Senior: Vinette Rupp
The Single Mother: Kim Markuson
The Homeless Shelter Chef: Jesse Schraufnagel
The Food Bank Officer: Aaron Brock
How It Works: Community Outreach
AFTERWORD: HOW GARDEN CITY HARVEST WORKS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Foreword
In January 2010, news came out that one in four American families
experienced at least one day in 2009 when they were too short of money to
buy the food they needed. That same week, different researchers released data
revealing that a third of Americans were not just overweight but obese. It’s
easy to get discouraged.
But it’s also easy, and important, to get encouraged.
This beautiful volume takes one small city, Missoula, Montana, and shows
how it is learning to feed itself. Missoula residents are growing food so that even
the neediest can eat and, in the process, are teaching their kids to grow the food
so they’ll have a way of providing for their families in the future.
This kind of urban/suburban farming builds community at least as effectively
as soil, and that community is at least as important as the produce. If you’ve got a
troubled teenager on your hands, he or she may well need to talk—but it will be
easier to talk if you’re stacking pumpkins at the same time, or pulling potatoes,
or weeding carrots. If you want to connect one neighbor with another, it turns
out that few things work better than starting a garden in the middle of the block.
Everyone can do something: compost, water, kibitz.
The stories and pictures here speak for themselves. But it’s important to know
that the larger positive trends are not confined to Missoula.
After 150 years of decline, the number of farms in the country has started to
grow rapidly in recent years. Most are small, producing local food for local
people, not corn syrup for enormous processing factories. Young people are
beginning to take up farming again in much greater numbers. There are still
more prisoners than farmers in America—but the gap has begun to close.
Farmers’ markets are the fastest-growing part of the national food economy, with
sales steadily increasing.
As you read this book, you’ll start to see that change has come not just because
it’s needed, but because we’ve finally begun to understand that there’s something
in us that needs to nurture and provide. Sociologists not long ago found that
shoppers at farmers’ markets had ten times more conversations per visit than
shoppers at supermarkets—it’s a different world we’ve begun to build. Or maybe
rebuild—because each picture in this book would be familiar to an American of a